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Java, PHP, RoR, C, they're all here to stay. Even Perl is still kicking, and it'll be decades still before the last line of COBOL has been written.

I think there is a general misconception that if a language is not new and growing, then it is somehow going away. If anything, it's probably the opposite. Something like inertia is a much better predictor for language lifetime than than growth or features. In practice, the longer a language has been around and the more likely it is to stick around.

> In practice, the longer a language has been around and the more likely it is to stick around.

I think this is called the Lindy effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

> The Lindy effect is a theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age. Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, the longer its remaining life expectancy.

There's a lot of selection bias wrt who submits posts to HN and the types of content they submit. It creates a sort of perception that tech/libraries/languages are moving near the speed of light and anyone who isn't treading along the bleeding edge is obsolete.

As someone who doesn't write Ruby, even I can grok RoR in a few hours. And even though it's boring and not trendy, it gets the job done for a lot of use cases.

There’s always going to be a demand for pure productivity.
Rails is fantastic! Especially with the new Hotwire/Turbo way of doing things. On a new personal project so far I haven't had to so much as TOUCH front-end JS!
It is alive and kicking. Open Core Ventures had to decide on a tech stack and I think Rails is still the best option https://boards.greenhouse.io/opencoreventures/jobs/475195700...
Boring technologies is just "boring, not obsolete.
Nothing matches it to this day really.
What would have replaced it?